My father tore his eyes away from the bed and our partially unpacked bags, which were sitting cosily side by side on the counterpane. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed the handles of mine and swung it onto the foldout luggage rack in the alcove next to the bathroom, then tunneled through the contents to find my toiletries.
“We wondered about dinner,” my father said stiffly. “Elizabeth and I are quite happy to eat here in the hotel, if you do not wish to go out again.”
Even with my back to him, I could feel that Sean had followed my movements. I knew damn well he read me like an open book and, by the way he flicked the towel sharply over the back of a chair, that I’d have to answer for my cowardice later.
“I wouldn’t recommend staying in,” Sean said, nothing in his voice. “The rooms are okay, but the last time I ate here I went down with food poisoning and I’ve no desire to go through that again—even with such an eminent medicine man on hand.”
“Very well,” my father said, inclining his head despite the danger of cracking his neck because he was holding it so rigid. “We’ll knock when we’re ready.” And with that he went out, closing the door oh so quietly behind him.
I shut my eyes. Sean’s voice, when it came, was viciously soft and close enough to make me jump, though I hadn’t heard him move round from the other side of the bed.
“You’re an adult. When are you going to stop apologizing to them, Charlie, for the way you live your life?”
I opened my eyes again, turned and found him crowding in on me so I had to tilt my head back to meet his. Briefly—just briefly—I thought about lying, but there wasn’t any point.
“Respect for the attitudes of an older generation hardly counts as an apology,” I tried instead.
“No excuse,” he dismissed. “Times change. Attitudes change. They should be the ones to adapt, not you.”
It took me a moment to find some spine and, when I did, it brought my chin up in defiance. “You’re the one who used to take Madeleine home with you and pretend intimacy, just to stop your mother matchmaking.”
His head went back in surprise and his anger dissipated just a little under the force of wry amusement.
“You’re right,” he allowed, his voice still cool, “but I did it to stop my mother worrying about me working too hard and not having a life. Not because I was ashamed of anything.”
“I am not ashamed of you, Sean.”
“Really?” He stepped back, and it was like he’d stepped back in time as well as space, to the arrogant, unsettling superior he’d been during my short and inglorious military career. Someone to whom my success or failure had appeared to be of minor interest because he had nothing invested in the outcome. “So, prove it.”
I didn’t, of course.
We went out and found a fabulous seafood place down near the water but I was so jittery that I couldn’t remember exactly what I had to eat or drink.
I told myself it was because I was on duty. And not just any duty, but guarding principals I cared about too deeply for it ever to be purely professional. Sean, on the other hand, was the model of the perfect executive protection officer—polite, remote, focused.
But, unusually for him, he made no attempt to blend with us on a social level. He’d disconnected himself from the family group, deliberately emphasizing his status as an outsider. Rather than a party of two related couples, it appeared more like we had inexplicably invited a servant along for the evening and were perhaps now regretting such a display of largesse. And I knew I was trying too hard to pour oil on troubled waters, otherwise I would have berated my parents for their supercilious demeanor. It was a long and uncomfortable evening.
After we got back to the hotel and settled my parents in for the night, I expected Sean to bring things to a head, but he didn’t. He’d never been a sulker and this new attitude scared me.
When he came out of the bathroom, he stripped with impersonal efficiency, and climbed into his side of the bed. It was big enough for the gap between us, when I slunk in silently on my side, to seem wider and more frozen than one person could hope to cross—even with dogsleds and an affinity for polar bears.
The following morning we risked breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then headed for the suburb of Norwood, where we would find Jeremy Lee’s widow. Norwood was southwest of Boston, just outside the I-95 ring road that cupped the city to Massachusetts Bay, skirting round the growing sprawl on its landward, western side.
The mammoth construction job that had been disrupting Boston the last time I’d been there didn’t seem to have changed or progressed overmuch. We sat in traffic, inevitably, which my parents bore with stoical patience and which Sean maneuvered his way through with expressionless skill. He’d hardly spoken to me all morning, a state of affairs that my father observed minutely, as if monitoring a patient for the manifestation of fatal symptoms.
We hadn’t picked up any signs of surveillance since we’d landed in Boston, but went through a series of routine countermeasures even so. They all came up empty. By the time we hit the main freeway, we knew we were clear. Sean kept our speed up, making good time, but the journey still seemed to take forever.
It was a little after ten when we pulled up outside a pretty two-story house in a quiet street of others, all painted beautifully contrasting pastel shades with white trim around the windows, like the residents had been to a color-coordination meeting before they all went out and bought paint in the spring.
Miranda Lee was not what I was expecting. The name sounded tall, refined and elegant, but the person who opened the screen door onto the covered porch was short and rather chunky, dressed in black leggings and a baggy football sweater, with her long wiry dark hair tangled around her face. But there was no debating the delight with which she greeted my parents.
“Richard! Elizabeth!” she cried, flinging herself onto each of them in bone-crushing hugs while Sean and I stood a little apart and watched the street, the neighboring houses, the wooded area behind. “Oh, I just can’t tell you how glad I am to see you both. I’m
As she said this last bit she cocked her head towards Sean and me, scanning us with shrewd dark eyes as we walked into the house.
“This is my daughter, Charlotte,” my father said without any particular pride. “And … Sean Meyer, who is helping to ensure our safety.”
As introductions went it was a cop-out, as he well knew, but Sean kept his expression bland as he shook hands with the widow. He refused a seat and instead stayed at one side of the room where the windows gave him two separate views of the street.
The ground floor was spacious and open, with a large kitchen off the living room, and a dining room separated by fold-back double doors. It was decorated in a haphazard style with splashes of vibrant color that should have jarred but somehow didn’t. The house was rammed with cheerfully disjointed clutter, easygoing and largely unpretentious.
I declined our hostess’s offer of herbal tea, which she went into the neighboring kitchen with my mother to make, and chose to stand alongside Sean, just far enough apart to keep the doorway to the kitchen in my field of view. It was not a gesture that went unnoticed by either man present.
When I glanced over, I found Sean and my father had locked gazes like two rutting stags battling for supremacy. I shifted uncomfortably under the weight of knowledge that I was the dubious prize they were fighting over.
It was juvenile and pointless and would not, I thought bitterly, help any of us to do what we had to.
Miranda came back through, balancing a tray containing cups and a china teapot and set it down on the low table in the living room.
“There now,” she said brightly, plonking herself down on the comfortably faded sofa and patting the cushion alongside her. “Come and sit, Elizabeth, and I’ll pour.”
“Miranda, we need to talk,” my father said gravely. “About Jeremy.”
